August 22nd show at the Del Mar Racetrack with Black Francisand the original Bluefinger lineup. They played all of Bluefinger, which was fucking amazing, plus the two songs I really like from Svn Fngrs, "All Around The World", my two favourite Christmass exclusives and an absolutely insane electric version of Six-Sixty-Six. Great show and definitely worth waiting out in front of the stage all day to secure a spot that no one else was going to take. Most of the videos and more info about the show is in the link.

She is absolutely insane. I'm fairly new to Soulseek so I don't know if this is common knowledge but holy mole I have never seen a person, in all of my years on the Internet, so desperate and pathetic when faced with the prospect of being wrong. For some back story, I am a pretty big Residents fan and when I heard from a friend that avant-garde-kitty of the IDM room claimed to have a solo album by Molly Harvey, a long-time Residents contributor, I was both skeptical and curious. Aside from doing some guest vocals on another band's album after leaving The Residents, I could find no information about her aside from the fact that she had a book published and that she had moved away from San Fransisco to start a family. Avant-garde-kitty, though, decided to disappear for about a month and a half, leaving both my friend and I (who was also curious about the album) hanging. Last night, she decided to log back on. The following chatlog (I know, I know, chatlog) is the conversation we had. I'm going to post the whole thing for posterity but I'll bold the interesting parts.

And then, as I predicted, she started to ignore me. Why am I posting this? I do this in the (hopefully not vain) hope of reaching out to at least one fellow Soulseek user and warn him or her about the psychotic train wreck that is avant-garde-kitty.

Heed my warning: avoid Soulseek user AVANT-GARDE-KITTY at all costs. Do not attempt to communicate with her. She may seem benign at first but she is a delusional, self-centered middle-aged woman who is willing to lie at any time for any reason, especially when she feels threatened. She will not hesitate to stab you in the back when she feels that her fragile position as a "respected" member of the IDM room.

DO NOT EVER QUESTION HER OMNISCIENT KNOWLEDGE OF THE AVANT-GARDE MUSICAL GROUP THE RESIDENTS BECAUSE SHE IS THEIR BIGGEST FAN

Doing so could result in her bragging about her collection and pointing out your inferiority because she knows everything about The Residents and this is a fact.

Please. I beg of you. Think twice before entering into ANY FORM of communication with her. I'm one of the few that has survived; that has not given up Soulseek altogether after experiencing her darker, TRUE side.

I got my copy of the new Melvins album in the mail yesterday. Newbury Comics rules, or so I hear, but they really need to bubble wrap their CD shipments because my case was cracked. I know that something like that is insignificant if the disc is alright but honestly, with Waffles and Soulseek and just the very fact that I am on the internet, it's hard to not care about the entire package of my physical copy of a very easily pirated album. Not that I'm justifying piracy; the entire point of my buying the CD is that it is the right thing to do, given that pirating it would be waiving my privilege to listen to the music, though I often selfishly disregard privilege and download a ton of music anyway.

I'll also admit to have downloaded the leak a few months back. I only listened to it once as to not ruin the entire experience with a rushed and thought to be possibly transcoded first listen. I was impressed but not blown away, though I barely remembered more than the first few songs days later, though I now know not for a lack of quality but a more likely subconscious repression of my memories to enhance my second "first listen" of the album when it was to be officially released. I mean, it's not like I wouldn't have bought it anyway, had it sucked. This is the fucking Melvins we're talking about.

So far, they have maintained that they can do no wrong. With the announcement of another album, it seemed to me like a failure would have been possible, though very unlikely. I really never gave A Senile Animal much of a chance when I first got into the Melvins a few years ago since the copy I downloaded sounded like shit (one of the few transcodes I found on OiNK), which only lasted me one listen before it was buried in my hard drive and eventually deleted, leaving me to my Ozmas and Bullheads. Only when a girl I (thought I was) madly in love with mentioned that she liked the album (she hated most of the music I listened to out of spite for me, so I thought that it was a pretty big deal) did I lie to her and say that I had heard it many times and loved it; that it was one of my favourites of theirs. When I did listen to it later that night, though, it became one of my favourites and not only in the context of their catalogue. Almost all of the tracks caught my attention on the first listen but it took a few more before I was able to, as objectively as possible, say that "A History Of Bad Men" is probably the finest song that the band has written since "Boris", which is coincidentally my favourite Melvins song. This isn't an A Senile Animal review, though. This is something way simpler:

I'm obviously insanely biased (if you hadn't already picked up on that from the last paragraph) and my opinions on music probably shouldn't be trusted in the first place because I was in Rapeublicans but seriously, I can't think of a better way to describe it. Okay, I probably could but I don't want to get all Melville on your asses because you're better off just finding out for yourself and I'm really only remotely interesting in very small doses.

If you liked A Senile Animal, you will like this. If you like stoner rock, you will like this. If you like sludgey hard rock throwbacks like Baroness, you will like this. This album is like A Senile Animal's tight-jeans cousin. There is more ass-kicking rock n' roll on this album than on any Melvins album and yet it still retains the subtelties of their last album. The harmonies, the emphasis on riffs and melody rather than the (beautifully) ugly sludge of their earlier records, the overall tightness... That's the first thing you hear on this album. Well, the second. The first thing you hear is a very distorted tambourine that quickly comes into focus, demonstrating the clarity of the production right off the bat. Then, after the sobering tambourine beat and a few bars of triangle jamming, the rest of the band kicks in (two drummers and all) and you hear that tightness. They're even more focused than on the last one and I can't complain. They whole band sounds amazing. I didn't get into Big Business as an entity separate from the Melvins until recently but this record contains some of their best performances I have ever heard (which are only the two Melvins albums they are on and Here Come the Waterworks), especially from Coady Willis this time around. I didn't think that the two drummers concept was explored (or exploited) enough with the last album but this time both Coady and Dale deliver. The preemptive favourite "Billy Fish" is, to me, the best example of this. They demonstrate the possibilities in the intro and chorus but demonstrate the power of two separate kits in sync during the verses.

The whole thing just kicks so much ass. It's definitely the most back-to-basics Melvins album in recent memory but it does so without being regressive in the least bit. It manages to remain simple and break some new ground at the same time. Buy it if you can find it and download it if you're a cheap bastard; I don't care. Just do yourself a favour and listen to it.

Last night was amazing. Restaurant (crazy electronic bluegrass punk who the fuck knows) and Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter were amazing, though she was kind of a bitch to her guitarist the whole way through. They may have been joking around but she seemed to be complaining to him a lot. Earth were... I can't even describe it. My friend and I smoked before the show and that was great but by the time Jesse Sykes was done the weed had pretty much worn off. We then realized that we forgot all of our cash in her car and the bouncers wouldn't let us run to our car that was a few blocks away. because she's a girl and a good actress, she convinced the bouncers to let us go and after grabbing the cash and smoking some more, we ran back with ample time left before they started. I'd shook Dylan's had and asked him if he was going to stay after the show to sell merch before Jesse Sykes and was surprised at how high his voice is. Given his appearance and the music he makes it was just kind of a shock.

Anyway, I can't even describe it to anyone who hasn't seen them live. A lot of people looked bored (even though they were headlining and the places was empty before they came on, what the fuck?) it was still one of the most intense live experiences of my life. The parts in "Omens and Portents II: Carrion Crow" where they all stop and start again... I've never felt anything like that before, how time seemed to suspend itself for those two seconds and how I felt like I was falling back to the ground from a high place when they started playing again. Aside from one Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method song ("Land of Some Other Order", I think) they played all-Bees material and it was stunning; even without Bill Frisell's amazing contributions to the songs it was still absolutely beautiful. The songs sounded even slower, even more hypnotic and breathtaking when they were being played in front of me. The crowd was weird, too. My friend and I went to Amoeba earlier and these kids were crossing the street, one of them with tight, ripped jeans, long hair, and a Boris shirt on (the one with the golden pentagram with the goat's head). I pointed the shirt out to her and she said, "That's really what Boris fans look like?", since I'm pretty much the only fan of theirs that she's met in real life and I don't dress like that. I told her that yeah, that's a metalhead and that we'd see a bunch of them at the show. We didn't. There were metalheads, sure (one guy had a really cool Iron Maiden shirt) but they were in the minority. The people looked really... normal. There were a lot of kids but there were a lot of middle-aged people there, too, and not the ones I'd have expected. I expected a bunch of metalhead kids and flannel-clad dudes in their '30s/'40s, you know, the kind of people who you'd expect were the teenagers in Sunn Amps and Smashed Guitars' audience. The guy right in front of me looked like a normal, boring kid with a striped polo shirt and cargo jeans, no older than sixteen. Later, I was in back of this hefty, middle-aged Black dude who looked out of place amongst the skinny white teenagers up front with him but he was one of the few that was really into it.

Seriously, the audience was mostly catatonic, as I mentioned earlier. I always rock the fuck out at shows, no matter what it is and I was pretty stoned so I think I may have been the most... pronounced of the lively people but no one was even bobbing their head! I may have just not caught it, since I had my eyes closed for most of the time but every time I did look back, everyone was just standing still. I obviously didn't expect much movement but I don't understand how this music didn't shake them to their core like it did to me; how they even had control of their bodies in the presence of such compelling and trance-inducing music.

Restaurant were unexpectedly amazing, with their cymbal made of license plates and bluegrass-on-DXM insanity and Jesse Sykes made beautiful, beautiful music as she and her band always make. Even though the venue has NO FUCKING SIGN INDICATING IN ANY WAY THAT IT IS THE ECHO it's a pretty cool place, though the lights were distracting sometimes. They were cool for the first half of Restaurant but it's time to turn the fucking disco ball off when you're at this kind of show. Sometimes they worked, like the yellow lighting during "Rise to Glory" and I closed my eyes most of the time anyway but it was pretty irritating at times.

It was an overall amazing show and now I'm sadder than ever that I didn't get to catch them with Sunn O))) and Weedeater last year.